Tennis:,When Dan was trying his bons mots for size: Richard Evans, a fellow-commentator, on the voice of Wimbledon

NEWS of Dan Maskell's death on Thursday had not reached California when I called Jack Kramer at his golf club near Los Angeles. The man who, for 12 years, formed one half of the most successful Anglo-American commentating team ever put together by the BBC, was shocked at the loss of his old Wimbledon partner, but the tribute, from one generous man to another, was profuse.

'I've never known a nicer man. No one loved the game more or knew it better, and working with him was just a great experience for me. We were sort of thrown together by the BBC, but it was never a problem. We were never bothered by our egos getting in each other's way or anything like that. Dan was just too much of a gentleman.'

And Kramer much too quick a learner. The 1947 Wimbledon champion, who turned himself into the big, brash American promoter of a sport still horrified by the word professional, admitted that he soon learned when to shut up when sitting alongside Maskell.

'I had worked for most of the American networks through the Fifties before starting with the BBC in 1960,' Kramer told me. 'And frankly we still had a lot to learn. Bryan Cowgill and Slim Wilkinson at the BBC were a long way ahead in their concept of how to televise a tennis match and, working with Dan, I was just content to fall in with the style they wanted.'

Kramer's ability to turn the volume down without losing any of his upbeat Californian charm was what made the partnership such a happy contrast in styles.

No less an authority than Desmond Lynam ranks the Maskell-Kramer partnership as the best ever at Wimbledon. 'I used to listen to them as a schoolboy,' Lynam recalled, 'They were the perfect match, coffee and cream.'

The partnership was broken by tennis politics. Perceived, wrongly, to be the instigator of the 1973 Wimbledon boycott in his role as Executive Director of the Association of Tennis Professionals, Kramer was told that he was no longer persona grata at the All England Club. Without doubt Kramer considered the loss of his commentating job the saddest aspect of a sorry affair. 'It was just so great working with Dan,' he said.

It was great for those of us who followed in his footsteps, too, although one needed to live up to a fairly fearsome standard of preparation before sliding into the cramped little seat alongside Dan on the Centre Court. If Richard Dimbleby was said to have been the best-prepared commentator in BBC history, then Maskell was not far behind.

Every morning during the championships he would be the first to arrive in the commentator's lounge and continue the note-making he had started at home the night before, checking every known fact about the matches to which he had been assigned. Then, in the box a few minutes before air-time, he would like to try a few for size, as it were. 'I thought I'd say something like this,' he'd say, and you, of course, would nod approvingly.

Gerald Williams, who worked with him a lot more than I did, noticed Maskell struggling to come to terms with some of the changes that overtook tennis - the Bjorn Borg bobby-soxers; the computer ranking points; John McEnroe's behaviour.

'It was strange Dan dying on the day McEnroe bowed out,' Williams said. 'Because, in a sense, he was there at the beginning with McEnroe, whose talent he adored but whose behaviour he couldn't abide. We were doing radio commentary in 1978 when Britain actually got to the Davis Cup Final in Palm Springs. The Americans had never heard of proper radio commentary on tennis, so we weren't glassed in.'

Williams recalls McEnroe, playing John Lloyd in his very first Davis Cup singles, throwing the ball up and then letting it fall. 'Would you tell those English commentators to be quiet?' McEnroe asked the umpire.

In retrospect, Maskell would have laughed at the irony of 'The Mouth' asking the quietest and most mellifluous voice in tennis to be quiet. Because he had a sense of humour, did Dan. And a gentleness and sense of honour that made him one of the best-loved figures of his time.

(Photograph omitted)